Bed bugs at Bard College at Simon’s Rock

Bed bugs have been found at Dolliver House, a Simon’s Rock dorm. (Last semester, they infested another dorm, Kendrick House).

Students in Dolliver House, the Simon’s Rock Llama Ledger tells us [dead link removed] found bed bugs last week. But wait ’till you hear how they got the message across to the school’s staff, once they discovered the problem:

Last Friday, first-year and Dolliver resident Jonathan [last name removed by request] posted a status update on Facebook, announcing that he had found bed bugs.

“I put it in my Facebook status first because it was a Friday, and Health Services was closed. …

“It was so weird because I was away at Oberlin,” [Jonathan]’s roommate Conrad Rothbaum says. “I found out my room was infested online.”

“I first was afraid of bugs when I got a bunch of bites around my ankles,” [Jonathan] says. “But at first I thought they were just mosquito bites, but when they lasted longer than two days I began to wonder what they were. Then one day I found a bug on my sheets, and killed it and put it in the trash. I looked up bed bugs online, and sure enough, the pictures matched what I had found in my bed,” [Jonathan] recounts.

Once again the internet comes to the rescue. How embarrassing for the college. Back in 78 when I was in a dorm it took over 3 dorms on campus. We got to stay in some nice hotel for about 2 weeks. It was hard to go back to the cramped quarters after that.

How interesting! We love to hear stories about bed bugs before 1998, when they were supposed to have “begun” coming back (there’s evidence, in fact, they were never really entirely gone).

I would not judge Simon’s Rock poorly because of this, though. Any college is prone to bed bugs (as is any place where people sleep or sit) and the most important factor is what the response is when they are detected.

Proactive searching is a good thing, too, and I hope more colleges will do it.